I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don’t lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.

  • Erik@discuss.onlineEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    I think a lot of the crunch in the labor market for programmers is “monkey see monkey do” thinking at the big tech companies. It might even be somewhat calculated, though I hesitate to call something a conspiracy when it could simply be due to stupidity on the part of senior management.

    Large tech companies tend to have a lot of flexibility and their total headcount because they have a wide variety of departments and tasks that they can set aside for an extended period before it causes any problems. Those problems will eventually catch up with them, though, as will a code base written by somebody who doesn’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish.

    So I think the pendulum is going to swing back to a labor crunch at some point. My guess is at least another 6 months before we see any hint of that, though. I don’t think it will be as bad as it was before the advent of LLMs, though. They really are a productivity enhancing tool, particularly for software developers who know what they’re doing.

    • Harlehatschi@lemmy.ml
      62·
      2 days ago

      The only field I see LLMs enhancing productivity of competent developers is front end stuff where you really have to write a lot of bloat.

      In every other scenario software developers who know what they’re doing the simple or repetitive things are mostly solved by writing a fucking function, class or library. In today’s world developers are mostly busy designing and implementing rather complex systems or managing legacy code, where LLMs are completely useless.

      We’re developing measurement systems and data analysis tools for the automotive industry and we tried several LLMs extensively in our daily business. Not a single developer was happy with the results.